Requirements Definition and Management for Dummies

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3. Requirements
Definition&
Management
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5. Requirements
Definition&
Management
by Robert D. Schneider,
Tony Higgins and
Keith Barrett
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6. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies®
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7. About the Authors
Robert D. Schneider is a Silicon Valley–based technology con-
sultant and author. He has provided database optimization,
distributed computing, and other technical expertise to a wide
variety of enterprises in the financial, technology, and govern-
ment sectors. He has written six books and numerous articles
on database technology and other complex topics such as
cloud computing, big data, developing and testing high quality
software, and service oriented architecture (SOA). He is a fre-
quent organizer and presenter at technology industry events
worldwide. Robert blogs at rdschneider.com.
Tony Higgins is the vice president of Product Management at
Blueprint Software Systems. He has over 28 years’ experience
in the software industry in a variety of technical and business
roles in the development of space and defense systems, IT sys-
tems, and commercial software products. For the last nine
years Tony has focused specifically on solutions for software
requirements definition and management and the business
analyst role.
Keith Barrett is a senior systems engineer at Blueprint
Software Systems and co-host of the Requirements Unplugged
podcast series from www.requirements.net. Keith is a
22-year veteran of the software industry. Prior to joining
Blueprint Software Systems, Keith served in the roles of busi-
ness development manager, director of professional services,
development manager, and practice manager for various soft-
ware organizations. Keith has also been a project manager,
developer, data modeler and business analyst in large financial
and telecommunications corporations. Keith’s background in
software development, reuse, and requirements uniquely posi-
tions him as a leading industry advocate for business analysis
best practices. His work on requirements and component-
based design has been featured in Business Analyst Times,
Application Development Trends, ComputerWorld, and Object
Magazine and he has spoken at numerous conferences globally.
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11. Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Foolish Assumptions.................................................................. 1
How This Book Is Organized..................................................... 2
Chapter 1: Meeting the Business Analyst...................... 2
Chapter 2: Conquering the Challenges of Business
Analysis.......................................................................... 2
Chapter 3: Building a Better Business Analysis
Experience..................................................................... 2
Chapter 4: Introducing Blueprint.................................... 3
Chapter 5: Ten Tips to Improve Business Analyst
Productivity................................................................... 3
Icons Used in This Book............................................................. 3
Where to Go from Here.............................................................. 4
Chapter 1: Meeting the Business Analyst. . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Boldly Exploring the Dynamic Business Environment........... 6
Engaging the Stakeholders........................................................ 7
Analyzing the (Business) Analyst............................................. 9
Education........................................................................... 9
Work background............................................................. 9
Place in the organization............................................... 10
Responsibilities............................................................... 10
Career trajectory............................................................ 11
Software development
environments.............................................................. 12
Imagining the Future................................................................. 13
Chapter 2: Conquering the Challenges of Business
Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Coping with Diverse Software Development
Methodologies....................................................................... 16
Coordinating teams........................................................ 17
Sprinting to milestones.................................................. 18
Clearing the backlog....................................................... 18
Managing Convoluted Business Processes........................... 19
Overcoming Inadequate Tooling............................................ 20
Writing when you could be drawing............................ 21
Typing when you don’t need to.................................... 22
Doing clerical work that’s not your job....................... 22
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12. x Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies
Conquering Cumbersome Review Cycles.............................. 22
Exploring the Economic Risks of Inefficient
Business Analysis.................................................................. 24
Chapter 3: Building a Better Business Analysis
Experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Taking Strategies from Other Industries................................ 27
Getting Visual............................................................................ 28
Getting Social............................................................................. 31
Getting Going............................................................................. 34
Reengineering processes............................................... 34
Rolling out software....................................................... 34
Forecasting the Future............................................................. 35
Chapter 4: Introducing Blueprint. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Highlighting the History of Blueprint..................................... 37
Sorting through Blueprint Solutions...................................... 38
Authoring requirements................................................ 38
Validating requirements................................................ 39
Managing requirements................................................. 40
Collaborating with team members............................... 41
Integrating with other technologies............................. 42
Watching Blueprint at Work.................................................... 43
Banking industry solutions............................................ 43
Legal industry solutions................................................ 44
Health industry solutions.............................................. 44
Legacy modernization solutions................................... 44
Chapter 5: Ten Tips to Improve Business Analyst
Productivity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Leveraging Visual Models........................................................ 45
Expressing Your Requirements.............................................. 46
Setting the Stage for Effective Collaboration......................... 47
Analyzing Stakeholders............................................................ 47
Getting the Right Tool for the Job.......................................... 48
Avoiding Being a Slave to the Document............................... 49
Creating a Traceability Strategy............................................. 50
Embracing the Rationale.......................................................... 50
Planning Your Integration with Development
and Testing............................................................................ 51
Starting Small and Evolving Over Time.................................. 51
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13. Introduction
Welcome to Requirements Definition & Management For
Dummies! Enterprises of all shapes and sizes have
become increasingly reliant on software to manage and opti-
mize every phaser — er, phase — of their operations. In fact,
software often provides a competitive edge that translates
into enhanced profitability for the company.
Project teams that design and deliver business applications
serve the needs of a broad range of stakeholders, including
the business, user communities, and IT itself. Within these
projects the business analyst plays a critical role as the main
driver of requirements definition and management. Yet the
position of business analyst is relatively new and many people
still misunderstand what it entails.
In this book, we introduce you to the position of the business
analyst, explain what they do, and describe their typical back-
ground. We also describe some of the major challenges facing
these talented professionals, as well as how employing a com-
bination of targeted technology and best practices can make
business analysts more effective. And if business analysts are
more effective, the entire organization can realize the full ben-
efits of its software assets.
Foolish Assumptions
Although it’s never a good idea to take anything for granted,
we do have some beliefs about our readers. First, we expect
that you work in either IT or the line of business, and that
your job somehow involves specifying, designing, develop-
ing, or testing business software. We also assume that you’re
interested in improving the way your organization delivers
these critical systems.
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14. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies2
How This Book Is Organized
We designed the five chapters of this book to give you a com-
prehensive understanding of requirements definition and
management, business analysts and the challenges and oppor-
tunities that they face, and how modern technology can come
to the rescue.
Chapter 1: Meeting the
Business Analyst
This chapter illustrates several business realities that have
led enterprises to give increasing responsibility to business
analysts. We also introduce the people who perform this
essential role; we describe their education, professional
backgrounds, daily responsibilities, and career paths.
Chapter 2: Conquering the
Challenges of Business Analysis
Business analysts must overcome many hurdles in order to
achieve maximum productivity and effectiveness. In this
chapter, we look at each of the following challenges:
✓ Diverse software development methodologies
✓ Intricate business processes
✓ Inadequate tooling
✓ Cumbersome review cycles
Chapter 3: Building a Better
Business Analysis Experience
Life doesn’t need to be so difficult for the business analyst.
Follow these three simple guidelines to dramatically improve
the effectiveness of defining and managing requirements, and
achieve project success:
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15. Introduction 3
✓ Get visual
✓ Get social
✓ Get going
Chapter 4: Introducing Blueprint
Blueprint is the preeminent vendor dedicated to delivering
solutions that help define and manage software require-
ments. In this chapter, you find out more about Blueprint, its
products, and how it has helped its customers improve their
requirements definition and management.
Chapter 5: Ten Tips to Improve
Business Analyst Productivity
Here you can find a helpful collection of general-purpose
suggestions that you can use to make the life of a business
analyst more pleasant — and productive.
Icons Used in This Book
Every For Dummies book features small illustrations, called
icons, sprinkled throughout the margins. We use the following
icons in this book.
The Tip icon guides you to right-on-target information to help
you become a better business analyst.
The Remember icon highlights information that is especially
important for you to know as you evaluate how to improve
business analysis procedures at your organization. To deter-
mine the most important information in each chapter, look for
paragraphs marked with this icon.
Seek out the On the Web icon if you want to find out even
more about effective business analysis.
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16. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies4
Where to Go from Here
You can read this book in any order that you want. What we
mean is that we don’t force you to start with Chapter 1 and
read straight through Chapter 5. If you want to discover more
about Blueprint, head to Chapter 4 first. Instead, if you want
to explore the role of the business analyst, read Chapters 1, 2,
and 3. Want some quick tips on how to improve the business
analyst experience? Check out Chapter 5. How you use this
book is entirely up to you.
You can also check out additional information online at
www.blueprintsys.com/RDMforDummies.
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and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

17. Chapter 1
Meetingthe
BusinessAnalyst
In This Chapter
▶ Understanding today’s business environment
▶ Determining major stakeholders
▶ Characterizing the business analyst
▶ Predicting the evolution of the business analyst
Enterprises have never found software more indispens-
able, whether firing photon torpedoes, raising deflector
shields, beaming up Scotty — or just conducting regular busi-
ness operations.
The importance of specifying, developing (or acquiring), and
implementing business applications correctly has increased in
recent years. The heightened emphasis companies have placed
on designing and rolling out software, combined with diverse
factors such as competitive pressures, mergers and acquisi-
tions, globally distributed teams, and technological advance-
ments, all contribute to growing demands and responsibilities
for a relatively new type of professional: the starship captain.
No, we’re kidding: this new professional is called the business
analyst.
In this chapter, we tell you all about the trends in the strange
new world of business and describe the vital role that the
business analyst plays.
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and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

18. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies6
Boldly Exploring the Dynamic
Business Environment
No matter what type of business you work in, your organization
most likely relies on software to drive just about every aspect
of daily operations. For decades, automation initiatives have
focused on back-office software, such as applications dedicated
to sales and marketing, accounting, human resources, and
other internal functions. However, in recent years companies
have also increased emphasis on customer-facing enterprise
software solutions, such as websites, e-commerce portals, and
self-service customer support, just to name a few.
Today’s heterogeneous, multifaceted software inventories
developed over many years. As a result, businesses must now
maintain a hodgepodge collection of software assets from dif-
ferent origins and time periods. The company may have built
some solutions in-house, external contractors may have built
others, and the company may have purchased still others off
the shelf from outside vendors. Lastly, some software may
have arrived through mergers and acquisitions.
Given the ad-hoc way that systems come into being, they vary
widely in terms of technology, design, quality, and maintain-
ability. Regardless of the exact composition of your software
portfolio, how well applications function — both as stand-
alone products and when working together as part of a larger
solution — heavily impacts your business.
Though the technology landscape has transformed over
the years, the amount of change it has undergone pales in
comparison with what has taken place in the overall business
environment:
✓ Economic realities: Recent macroeconomic conditions
place businesses under intense pressure to generate rev-
enue, reduce cost, and at the same time deliver outstand-
ing customer value.
✓ Competitive pressures: Businesses face a daily struggle
against rivals new and old in much more dynamic and
competitive marketplaces than ever before.
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19. Chapter 1: Meeting the Business Analyst 7
✓ Outsourcing and distributed teams: In reaction to
today’s shrinking margins and competitive pressures,
many businesses turn to innovative cost-control and
time-to-market strategies.
✓ Regulatory requirements: Governments and industry
agencies alike are now much more energetic in their
demands on business for governance and accountability.
✓ Mergers and acquisitions: The challenging business
environment both forces and creates opportunities for
business restructuring in the form of selling off business
units or divisions, or of merging or acquiring entire
companies.
As we describe in the introduction, the business analyst sits
at the very heart of the enterprise’s business software endeav-
ors. Because software applications are now completely indis-
pensable to business success, and because they operate in
such dynamic environments, the role of business analyst has
become essential and prominent. Before we look at who busi-
ness analysts are and what they do, however, we first detail
the other major players on a software project.
Engaging the Stakeholders
Whether you’re building software from scratch, or implement-
ing a packaged software product that you bought from a vendor,
more participants — each with a highly diverse background —
may be attached to your project than you first realize.
As the primary party accountable for the delivery of the new
or enhanced business application, the IT organization enlists
many different types of people on a software project, includ-
ing the following:
✓ Project manager: Oversees all aspects of the initiative,
right up to deployment into production.
✓ Architect/Designer: Establishes and maintains a solid
technical foundation across the portfolio, ensuring the
long-term viability of the new solution.
✓ Developer: Develops the application from the ground up,
or integrates a third-party solution into the overall tech-
nology portfolio.
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20. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies8
✓ Tester: Ensures the developed application fulfills its
requirements and seeks out and identifies any flaws in
the new system that may impact its ability to work as
advertised.
✓ IT operations: Ensures that the solution is available and
operational for everyone who needs access, after the
solution has been built (or bought).
The business division also recruits a diverse talent roster:
✓ Sponsoring executive: Business owner of the overall ini-
tiative, and the person who usually signs the checks.
✓ Client: Person representing the needs of the business on
a daily basis.
✓ End-user: Person, either internal to the organization or
external, depending on the application, who will interact
with the new solution.
✓ Partner: Internal employees and customers aren’t the
only stakeholders who participate on a new software
project. In today’s collaborative world, many firms rely
on tight-knit relationships with external partners.
✓ Government and regulatory agencies: With so many
enterprises coping with externally imposed constraints,
these parties sometimes have seats at the table as well.
Any given project can involve 10 or more unique types of
stakeholder, each of whom has a very different background,
skillset, set of expectations, and obligations.
Although a modern software project involves so many play-
ers, each of the roles mentioned in the preceding list has been
recognized as a distinct and separate job for many years by
management, professional organizations, and vendors that
design and sell specialized solutions to help each execute his
or her role.
Yet one title is conspicuously missing from most roll calls: the
business analyst. In fact, management has only recently recog-
nized this role and designated a formalized title. A significant
number of organizations still don’t even use this label. What
makes this state of affairs particularly ironic is that the busi-
ness analyst plays a central role in coordinating the efforts of
each of the different stakeholders on a project.
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21. Chapter 1: Meeting the Business Analyst 9
Business analysts did not have their own professional orga-
nization until fairly recently: the International Institute of
Business Analysts (IIBA) didn’t form until 2003.
To find out more about the IIBA, head to their website at
http://www.iiba.org.
In response to the newfound attention organizations are
paying to business analysts, vendors now market specialized
solutions to them as well. As we explain in Chapter 2, these
specialized solutions are essential to helping business
analysts — and their projects — succeed.
Analyzing the (Business)
Analyst
Although business analysts aren’t all identical, they do tend
to share a number of traits, characteristics, and common
backgrounds.
Education
Business analysts are highly educated professionals and many
hold university degrees. A notable percentage of business
analysts go on to earn advanced degrees in fields such as
computer science, engineering, and business administration.
Work background
Business analysts often transfer into their roles from other
job categories. According to a recent survey, the five most
common origins for business analysts are
✓ Software development
✓ IT operations
✓ Line of business
✓ Quality assurance
✓ User community
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22. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies10
Place in the organization
In general, about half of the surveyed business analysts report
to the IT division, with the remainder serving the line of busi-
ness. Often those reporting to IT have a more technical skill-
set (and sometimes have the title business systems analyst,
or BSA) whereas those reporting to the business often have
more domain knowledge and experience.
Given that business analysis is such a new and developing
field, business analysts work on a diverse collection of teams
within IT and business, such as:
✓ Centralized business analyst team
✓ Project/Program management office (PMO)
✓ Quality assurance and testing
✓ Software development
Responsibilities
Every day, the business analyst collaborates with a broad col-
lection of stakeholders from the IT organization, the line of
business, and outside participants such as customers, part-
ners, and governmental entities. To succeed, the business
analyst must be capable of understanding the distinct needs
of each stakeholder and communicate with them in language
that they understand.
At first glance, you may imagine that the business analyst
focuses solely on defining and managing requirements, but
this aspect forms only part of the story. In fact, many busi-
ness analysts are also responsible for ancillary tasks related
to these requirements, such as program and project manage-
ment, testing, and profit and loss outcomes.
Although in some cases stakeholders are concentrated in
one location, more often they are distributed across multiple
locations. Dispersed stakeholders introduce additional com-
plexities and challenges to the job of a business analyst, as we
illustrate in Chapter 2.
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23. Chapter 1: Meeting the Business Analyst 11
Regardless of where the stakeholders operate, the business
analyst must gather all relevant information, analyze it to
produce a set of requirements, validate these requirements
with the original stakeholders and sometimes other stake-
holders as well, and then coordinate distribution of require-
ments information across a wide audience, such as:
✓ External customers
✓ IT operations
✓ Line of business
✓ Quality assurance and testing
✓ Software developers
✓ Technical architecture team
In many ways the role of a business analyst parallels that of an
author writing a story or screenplay — either way, you could
call it “The Voyages of the Enterprise.” Indeed, the business
analyst must tell the story of the application that the business
needs and do so in such a way that the business stakeholders
can easily consume the story and confirm that it meets their
needs, and that the technology stakeholders (that is, testers,
architects, and developers) can read it and understand what
they need to test, design, and develop. As with any good
story, the business analyst must use appropriate language,
add in clear illustrations, and provide good visual imagery.
Because many organizations have only recently identified
business analysis as a separate and distinct job, business
analysts often struggle with a lack of clearly defined and well-
understood tasks, not to mention a scarcity of supporting
technology.
Career trajectory
Organizations are now starting to recognize the importance of
business analysis, and because of this development, new and
exciting opportunities for advancement are opening up. As
more companies adopt a business analyst center of excellence
(CoE) or requirements management office (RMO) structure, they
create well-defined career paths with manager- and director-
level positions.
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24. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies12
Software development
environments
Enterprises employ an assortment of software development
methodologies. Common labels for these approaches include
the following:
✓ Waterfall: In this approach, a project flows through
a series of rigidly defined, sequential phases such as
requirements, design, development, testing, implementa-
tion, and deployment.
✓ Incremental: This approach starts out with a relatively
small set of project features, and then builds upon this
foundation by integrating new parts as they become
available.
✓ Spiral: This is an incremental-based development
approach with a heavy reliance on prototyping to
reduce risk.
✓ Unified process: In this approach, a project relies heavily
on use cases to drive incremental software delivery.
✓ Agile: This populist, developer-focused, highly iterative
approach focuses on deliverable value versus interim
work products.
✓ Hybrid: Enterprises can also create their own, site-specific
blends of all of the above approaches. In particular, adapta-
tions of agile for larger organizations are rapidly evolving;
these are sometimes referred to as enterprise agile, among
other monikers.
In the past several years, organizations have been more and
more drawn to the agile approach to developing software.
Agile usually incorporates three traits:
✓ Emphasis on speed, instead of time-consuming require-
ments definition
✓ Frequent software build/test/deploy cycles
✓ Constant feedback and adjustments
As we explain in Chapter 2, agile software development tech-
niques can add to the pressure on business analysts.
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25. Chapter 1: Meeting the Business Analyst 13
Imagining the Future
The role of business analyst is continually changing. After all,
the position is still relatively young compared to others in the
organizational landscape.
Business analysts operate in an environment of great confu-
sion and uncertainty, but this environment also yields tremen-
dous opportunity to create a demonstrable, positive impact
on the entire business.
For example, organizations increasingly expect business
analysts to be able to understand, explain, and justify how
the requirements that they help gather and organize deliver
tangible value to the business. This trend alone will definitely
have major impacts on the responsibilities of the business
analyst. Business-level accountability will soon be an integral
component of the business analyst job description, but satis-
fying these responsibilities will be particularly difficult given
the obstacles business analysts already face each day.
In short the job of the business analyst is certainly a chal-
lenging one, but one that is rapidly increasing in importance,
has lots of room to grow and innovate, and looks to provide
tremendous opportunities. We are interested to see how the
business analyst’s role will change in the next generation of
enterprise!
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26. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies14
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27. Chapter 2
ConqueringtheChallenges
ofBusinessAnalysis
In This Chapter
▶ Dealing with different development strategies
▶ Keeping complicated business processes under control
▶ Switching to specialized tools
▶ Making review cycles more efficient
▶ Seeing how inefficient business analysis affects real-world companies
As we describe in Chapter 1, enterprises, professional
organizations, and vendors have long accepted and
understood most of the assignments on any given technology
project. They have, however, only recently recognized the
separate and distinct job of the business analyst.
The challenges business analysts face are even more formi-
dable because their daily responsibilities are in continual
flux and undergoing ceaseless transformations. Why are
their roles so fluid? Well, the answer lies in some sobering
statistics about IT projects: end-users take advantage of only
45 percent of delivered features (according to the Standish
Chaos Report), and rework consumes 40–50 percent of proj-
ect budgets (Boehm and Basili). Issues that the project team
could have addressed when defining requirements are key
contributors to these unfortunate numbers. In fact, faulty
requirements form the root cause for 75–85 percent of rework
(Leffingwell). With the business analyst at the center of the
requirements process, no wonder this role is attracting so
much attention!
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28. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies16
Mainly due to the pivotal nature of the business analyst role
and its recent designation as a separate job responsibility,
business analysts struggle to overcome numerous impedi-
ments. Some of the more pressing issues include:
✓ Diverse software development methodologies
✓ Intricate business processes
✓ Inadequate tooling
✓ Cumbersome review cycles
In the following section, we look at each of these obstacles in
more detail, and then connect the dots to comprehend what
happens to the entire organization when the business analyst
can’t surmount these roadblocks.
Coping with Diverse Software
Development Methodologies
Businesses constantly search for the most modern and
efficient techniques for designing, developing, testing, and
deploying software. This focus isn’t a surprise, especially
given the strategic nature of information assets such as soft-
ware and data: well-designed systems deliver demonstrable
competitive advantages that directly translate to market
share and profitability.
Over the years, many organizations have sought out, selected,
and then implemented numerous different — and often
contradictory — approaches to creating software, all in a
frenetic attempt to seize the often-elusive strategic edge.
This has led to an abundance of incompatible techniques that
the business analyst must find a way to reconcile. Business
analysts often encounter fragmented teams using their
own methods that can range from waterfall to incremental
to highly iterative agile, not to mention internally created
hybrids.
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29. Chapter 2: Conquering the Challenges of Business Analysis 17
In recent years, the agile development approach has gained
considerable ground, and now many organizations consider it
a highly productive technique for delivering software. As you
may expect from its name, agile means responding quickly to
changes. Agile arose from developer dissatisfaction with rig-
orous, prescriptive, heavy processes that, in the view of these
developers, focused on the wrong elements.
Agile is not just one methodology but a family of methodolo-
gies that sprung from a common set of principles called the
Manifesto for Agile Software Development, written by a group
of 17 developers in 2001 (see agilemanifesto.org). The
manifesto states the following:
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by
doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we
have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we
value the items on the left more.
Coordinating teams
Agile teams are typically comprised of four to nine people
who play specific roles, although who plays each role can
change. These teams control planning and prioritization for
their area of work, and they connect on a daily basis in an
interactive session called a scrum to coordinate and synchro-
nize their efforts.
One of the most popular agile methodologies is called scrum
and its traits are consistent with the Manifesto for Agile
Software Development.
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30. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies18
Sprinting to milestones
Development proceeds in well-defined time periods called
sprints, which typically last two or three weeks and the result
of each sprint is a functioning, demonstrable portion of the
product.
Clearing the backlog
The essence of an agile approach like scrum is its ability to
respond effectively to changes in priorities during the project.
The project backlog is a prioritized list of the work to be done.
The end of every sprint presents the opportunity to change
direction. In other words, you can start developing the next
sprint to a revised set of priorities as defined in the backlog.
You can see an overhead view of this process in Figure 2-1.
Figure 2-1: Agile at work.
Agile is particularly daunting for the business analyst because
of the marked reduction in the amount of time spent on —
and attention paid to — the job of authoring, understanding,
reviewing, and approving requirements before the scrum
teams begin to develop the system. In fact, many cite the
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31. Chapter 2: Conquering the Challenges of Business Analysis 19
alleged efficiencies this reduction causes as the best reason
to switch to an agile approach. Yet advocates of agile often
fail to recognize that paying less attention to these important
areas can cause havoc and chaos, waste time, and squander
money.
Good requirements and agile are absolutely compatible — in
principle. Requirements are authored in agile prior to build-
ing iterations of the system. These requirements are detailed
for each iteration individually to a level consistent with other
methods just before implementation.
Check out the Agile Alliance, an agile advocacy group, online
at www.agilealliance.org.
Managing Convoluted
Business Processes
The business analyst can properly and thoroughly author and
document requirements for any new software solution only
by fully comprehending the underlying — and often extremely
complex — business processes that will be supported by the
new system. Because a project is full of unknowns, the busi-
ness analyst must stay on top of these processes throughout
the project. Speaking of rapids, in waterfall methodologies
where the project team creates a more exhaustive and
detailed set of requirements up front, the lessons learned
along the way are incorporated later in the form of enhance-
ment requests. Agile, however, follows more of a learn-as-
you-go approach. The business analyst position is daunting
enough when you examine it at face value, but a number of
factors combine to make it even trickier:
✓ Business processes are always evolving: Given how fast
operational procedures can change, the initially defined
requirements may quickly go stale.
✓ IT and line-of-business stakeholders are dispersed:
Conducting effective research is hard enough when all
stakeholders — each with his or her own set of needs
and agendas — can gather around a single conference
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32. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies20
room table. The task is much more imposing when the
stakeholders are distributed around the world, where
they often work for different organizations. You can see a
visual depiction of distributed teams in Figure 2-2.
✓ The business itself may undergo rapid change: Very
little is permanent today; regulatory changes, mergers,
acquisitions, and sudden demands for more rigorous
cost control can affect every enterprise.
Figure 2-2: Business analysts are at the heart of distributed team
collaboration.
Not only are business analysts confronted with agile software
development techniques that devalue their work, and highly
involved business processes that change continuously, but
subpar supporting technology also hampers many business
analysts — which is what we describe next.
Overcoming Inadequate Tooling
According to the voke Market Snapshot Report: The Role of
the Business Analyst, 80 percent of business analysts still carry
out their highly challenging jobs using generic, non-specialized
personal productivity tools:
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33. Chapter 2: Conquering the Challenges of Business Analysis 21
✓ Primary requirements authoring: Microsoft Word
✓ Principal communication channel: E-mail
✓ Dependency tracking tool: Microsoft Excel
Read the full voke report to find out more about the business
analyst position: www.vokeinc.com/research/topic/
market-snapshots.html.
From start to finish, the business analyst constantly has to
find ways to overcome each of the following difficulties intro-
duced by using general-purpose tools.
Writing when you could
be drawing
Many people are most effective when they think and com-
municate visually, especially about complex subjects like
creating a comprehensive software solution. Text is often a
poor substitute to well-thought-out graphical representations
(check out Figure 2-3 to see what we mean). If text is the only
form of conveying information, the business analyst must gen-
erate volumes that could be conveyed more effectively with a
single picture . . .
Figure 2-3: The contrast of using Text versus Images
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34. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies22
Typing when you don’t need to
The act of writing a document consumes an unnecessary
amount of time, especially for a detail-oriented procedure
such as designing a software solution. Ironically, as the review
cycles plod on, business analysts feel compelled to write addi-
tional text to provide more clarity, which makes the require-
ments document even bigger, takes more time, and further
expands the review cycle.
Doing clerical work that’s
not your job
Shepherding and organizing documents and review comments
is primarily a non-creative and time-consuming set of rote
chores. Focusing on these tasks doesn’t leave a lot of time for
the primary, strategic value of the business analyst: critical
and analytical thinking. Getting better at your job is nearly
impossible when you’re busy putting out fires and working
with inefficient tools.
On top of all these headaches, the true implications of subpar
tooling really become evident during the review cycle, par-
ticularly when team members use general-purpose tools that
are not aimed at supporting the distinct needs of business
analysts.
Conquering Cumbersome
Review Cycles
After the first pass at creating a requirements document is
done, other project participants often give review cycles a low
priority. They don’t push the review process aside because
they are purposely ignoring their job responsibilities; they do
so because the act of reviewing a massive document is tedious
at best. Indeed, reviewing a massive document sets their faces
to stunned. Furthermore, they may not even notice the
document: if you email vital requirements documents they
compete with all sorts of other email clutter for reviewers’
attention.
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35. Chapter 2: Conquering the Challenges of Business Analysis 23
The review-and-edit cycle consumes an incredible amount of
time, which can grow exponentially as the size of the docu-
ment increases. In fact, the bigger the document, the more
likely that the reviewers simply sign off without reading it.
These blind approvals can create serious problems later on.
When reviewers actually do examine documents, the track
changes capability of word processors doesn’t encourage
collaboration. Instead, reviewers examine requirements docu-
ments in isolation and clutter them even more with multi-
colored markups. See Figure 2-4 for an example.
Figure 2-4: The inefficiencies of using track changes.
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36. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies24
When it comes to dependencies and relationships among the
requirements (traceability), business analysts must track
them using spreadsheets, which are notoriously inefficient for
performing these types of tasks. Compounding the problem
further, spreadsheets don’t include an automatic history of
changes or evolution of the requirements.
Design documents, emails, and dependency tracking spread-
sheets aren’t linked together, which means that team members
can easily lose the thread and forget how the final design
came together.
Exploring the Economic Risks of
Inefficient Business Analysis
Aside from making the business analyst’s job much more
difficult, significant financial and operational risks directly
result from the inefficient ways that organizations create and
manage requirements definitions. Risks include not only wast-
ing money on the project itself, but also the economic impact
of not solving the problem that the project is supposed to
address. Often this latter risk is orders of magnitude worse
than the expenditures on the project.
For example, consider these real-world crises that failed soft-
ware projects caused directly:
✓ Ford Motor Company: Ford abandoned a $400-million-
dollar purchasing system. To find out more, visit http://
trunc.it/n0qf7.
✓ New York City: The CityTime payroll system ballooned
significantly over budget. It began as $63 million dollar
project, but ended up costing $760 million. You can
read all the details at http://trunc.it/mji48.
✓ Internal Revenue Service: The IRS abandoned a highly
touted electronic fraud detection system after a total
expenditure of $185 million. This cost makes up only
part of the damage, because the lack of a solution to
fraud issues led to more than $800 million worth of
fraudulent refunds in the first year alone. Visit simple
architectures.blogspot.ca/2009/09/cost-of-
it-failure.html and search for Fraud on the page.
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37. Chapter 2: Conquering the Challenges of Business Analysis 25
✓ UK Electronic Health Records: The Department of
Health abandoned the entire program after a $12-bil-
lion expenditure. You can find a brief overview here:
www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2011/8/5/uk-
health-system-expected-to-abandon-ehealth-
network.aspx.
✓ U.S. Air Force Expeditionary Combat Support System:
The Air Force cancelled the project after cost projections
for the project rose from $1-billion to $2.1 billion and
delivery projections climbed to eight years beyond the
original date. Investigators cited requirements as one of
the root causes. Read the full story here: http://www.
bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-24/senators-
to-probe-air-force-s-1-billion-failed-
software.html.
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38. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies26
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39. Chapter 3
BuildingaBetterBusiness
AnalysisExperience
In This Chapter
▶ Borrowing tactics from other disciplines
▶ Making information visual
▶ Collaborating with your team
▶ Overcoming misconceptions that block progress
▶ Predicting changes in business analysis
In Chapters 1 and 2 of this book, we describe all the nega-
tive circumstances that business analysts must transcend.
But neither hodgepodge software assets nor convoluted busi-
ness practices can stay these professionals from the swift
completion of their appointed duties: proven techniques can
make the business analysis process much smoother, more
efficient, and more pleasant for every stakeholder — which
benefits the entire organization, not just the business analyst.
The first step on the road to this happy destination is to real-
ize that business analysts aren’t the only professionals who
must define complex systems. In fact, you can discover a lot
by examining how other trades do it.
Taking Strategies from
Other Industries
The failures and abandoned projects that are so common-
place in IT just aren’t tolerated in other endeavors, such as:
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40. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies28
✓ Architecture
✓ Construction
✓ Manufacturing
✓ Transportation
After all, how often do you hear of an abandoned, half-
constructed skyscraper?
How do designers and implementers in each of these trades
communicate? Here’s a hint: they don’t generally write
50-pound specifications to get their ideas across. Instead, they
use visual representations whenever they can. These blue-
prints and models communicate highly complex concepts in
as streamlined a manner as possible.
They must be making some good choices, because buildings
take shape and remain standing, and airplanes roll out onto
the tarmac and fly.
IT organizations may not get to smash champagne bottles on
the front of a new software release, but who says they can’t
adopt these time-tested approaches to generating and dis-
seminating blueprints?
Three major (yet surprisingly simple to follow) strategies
make the job of creating software requirements easier:
✓ Getting visual
✓ Getting social
✓ Getting going
Getting Visual
As we point out in Chapter 2, enormous text-based specifica-
tions are not the most effective way of communicating the
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41. Chapter 3: Building a Better Business Analysis Experience 29
complex concepts that underlie modern software solutions.
In fact, these massive documents may be the worst way
to present this type of information, especially because
line-of-business and IT organizations don’t commonly use the
same vocabularies to describe the same concepts. You can
see a sample of the types of terms used by business and IT
staff in Figure 3-1. (But keep in mind that the words in the left
column don’t match the words in the right column. Don’t start
casually dropping the word widget into discussions with IT
staff believing that it’s a synonym for earnings per share.)
Figure 3-1: Example vocabulary differences between business and IT
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42. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies30
Instead of writing the next great novel, why not use the
proven power of pictures, diagrams, flowcharts, user inter-
face mockups, and other well-regarded graphical techniques
to help arrive at a consensus about how you want the new
system to work?
Switching from heavy reliance on text to a more balanced
approach using visual images delivers a number of attractive
benefits:
✓ Clerical work doesn’t take over: Business analysts no
longer perform the largely clerical role of maintaining an
unwieldy text document. Instead, they can apply their
critical thinking and analytical skills to help deliver
better solutions.
✓ Language barriers disappear: Visual representations
aren’t burdened by perplexing cross-department or
spoken language differences and are thus far easier to
understand. A common visual language helps bring the
proposed system to life.
✓ Review cycles go faster: Clear, more visual representa-
tions help to greatly reduce the amount of time spent
during the review cycle, and make reviewers more likely
to actually want to engage.
✓ Bottlenecks expand: When the business analyst no
longer has to perform meticulous document mainte-
nance, he or she is no longer the main impediment to
progress in the review cycle.
Taken together, all of these improvements bring clarity and
efficiency to the software process — including agile. Examples
of these visualizations are shown in Figure 3-2.
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43. Chapter 3: Building a Better Business Analysis Experience 31
Figure 3-2: Taking a visual approach
Getting Social
The most effective efforts arise when diverse and talented
teams collaborate, yet many software development projects
do the opposite.
We can understand why team members find it hard to collabo-
rate; look at all the barriers they must overcome:
✓ Distributed teams across separate time zones, languages,
and cultures
✓ Insufficient tooling, reflected by enormous specifica-
tions that are assembled in documents and emailed
everywhere
✓ Many different job functions
✓ Never-ending review cycles
✓ User resistance to endless review sessions
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44. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies32
Despite what word processor–software vendors tell you,
employing the track changes feature (shown in Figure 3-3) on
thick, heavy documents doesn’t facilitate well-integrated, pro-
ductive, and harmonious team collaboration, especially when
your work incorporates complex and interrelated concepts.
Instead of continuing to suffer alone being tied to track
changes, why not incorporate some proven social-based tech-
niques to get people working together?
Historically, requirements definition efforts have generally gone
onward with relatively little interaction primarily because the
supporting tools weren’t mature enough, resulting in practitioners
spending all their time with their heads down working in silos.
Figure 3-3: The inefficiencies of using track changes
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45. Chapter 3: Building a Better Business Analysis Experience 33
But now solutions are available on the market that blend the
visual approaches we describe earlier in this chapter with
sophisticated yet easy-to-use collaboration features such as:
✓ Inline discussions that traverse departments and time
zones
✓ Easy online self-service review and approve
See the inline discussions of a streamlined review cycle in
Figure 3-4.
Figure 3-4: Inline discussions in a streamlined review cycle.
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46. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies34
A streamlined review cycle lets stakeholders decide how,
when, and from where they want to participate, instead of
being caught and dragged into meetings.
Getting Going
Two perceptions among IT organizations have formed barri-
ers to business analysis progress.
Reengineering processes
To begin with, many organization members believe they must
first reengineer all of their processes before bringing in sup-
porting technology. This belief just isn’t accurate — it’s a
myth that must be busted.
With such little investment made in business analysis tooling
in the past, the new crop of products represents a huge leap
forward in capability. These capabilities make possible pro-
cesses that organizations otherwise may not even consider,
so crafting a process without regard for the tools can result in
missing these opportunities. Instead of waiting for the perfect
processes to arrive, why not employ technology up front to
help improve these critical processes in a more evolutionary
fashion? Having the right tool allows organizations — for the
first time — to make specific process improvements that they
can then use to drive further refinements and new process
definitions. Thus, deploying the right tooling serves as a cata-
lyst for many future optimizations.
Rolling out software
The other misconception IT organizations have is that if
they implement powerful new technology they must make
wholesale changes to the way they conduct daily operations.
Many new solutions aimed at the business analyst, however,
are perfectly capable of rolling adoption: certain features are
enabled up front, and others are incorporated as time and
business needs require.
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47. Chapter 3: Building a Better Business Analysis Experience 35
After all, most users of Microsoft Excel employ only about 5
percent of its full capability, yet they still derive tremendous
value from it.
You can find out more details about the Blueprint software
solution in Chapter 4, but see Figure 3-5 for the possibilities
of a phased rollout of a requirements definition and manage-
ment solution.
Figure 3-5: Sample steps in a phased rollout from Blueprint.
Forecasting the Future
By now you can see that the business analyst performs a
highly dynamic, subjective job — to say the least! Where is
the business analyst role heading? We see at least four trends
that will continue to impact the business analyst:
✓ The role will become even more formalized and influential
as companies realize its importance to the organization.
✓ More will be expected of business analysts as they will
increasingly take responsibility not only for feature-laden
new solutions, but also for the business value realized
from them.
✓ Business analysis centers of excellence (CoEs) and require-
ments management offices (RMOs) will emerge and grow in
prominence as they increasingly prove their value.
✓ Business analysts will become pivotal for large enter-
prises currently struggling to adopt agile practices as
they recognize the key role requirements play in larger,
distributed initiatives.
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48. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies36
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49. Chapter 4
IntroducingBlueprint
In This Chapter
▶ Checking out the company’s background
▶ Exploring the solutions Blueprint offers
▶ Observing Blueprint in action
As we depict in Chapter 1, management, professional
organizations, and vendors are finally giving business
analysts the recognition and respect they deserve. Blueprint
is one of the most prominent solution providers to service
these previously ignored professionals.
In this chapter, we introduce you to Blueprint’s product, also
named “Blueprint,” which was designed specifically for busi-
ness analysts. We begin by describing the background and
founding philosophy of Blueprint, followed by an overview of
its product. We pay particular attention to how you can put
Blueprint to work to overcome the barriers to success that
have been frustrating business analysts for years. We then
showcase several examples of Blueprint delivering tangible
benefits to its clients.
Highlighting the History
of Blueprint
Blueprint was founded in 2004 and was a pioneer in the
emerging discipline of requirements definition. Since that
time, Blueprint has focused entirely on providing solutions to
eliminate the problems associated with defining and managing
software requirements.
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50. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies38
According to industry data, creating or enhancing business
applications is fraught with budget and schedule overruns.
This process also heavily influences application quality. Many
of the issues organizations experience stem from poor or
inadequate levels of interaction between business stakehold-
ers and the IT professionals developing the software.
Blueprint can transform this business-IT relationship into
a visual and engaging collaboration. Errors and omissions
surface earlier, team members deliver a higher-quality set of
application requirements sooner, and requirements-related
rework — which studies show consumes 40–50 percent of
project budgets on average — shrinks. Blueprint’s unified
approach improves the probability of delivering applications
on time and on budget. Predictable project schedules com-
bined with faster time to market is critical to the competitive
success of Blueprint’s global customer base, and these cus-
tomers depend on Blueprint to achieve their goals.
Find out more about Blueprint here: www.blueprintsys.com.
Sorting through Blueprint
Solutions
In this section, we tell you more about how Blueprint solves
the difficult requirements definition and management prob-
lem. To help bring the discussion to life, we examine the
impact of Blueprint on several of the most essential job
responsibilities of the business analyst.
Authoring requirements
As we describe in Chapter 3, business analysts must continu-
ally strive to replace words with visual representations when
creating requirements. Doing so helps to remove ambiguity
and make the resultant requirements more engaging and
easier to understand.
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51. Chapter 4: Introducing Blueprint 39
Blueprint provides a broad range of rich, visual requirements
editors, as shown in Figure 4-1. You can choose the format
that’s perfectly suited to each type of requirement, which
promotes consistency and ensures that you don’t miss any
important elements.
Figure 4-1: Blueprint provides a wide range of visual requirement editors.
Validating requirements
Creating a well-defined set of requirements is just the start:
making sure that they are correct is equally important. Blueprint
engages stakeholders and helps them confidently drive a set
of requirements to final approval. Blueprint’s online review
and approve interface makes reviewing requirements fast and
easy for stakeholders, while review dashboards let the busi-
ness analyst control, coordinate, and conclude large-scale
requirements reviews among the diverse set of stakeholders
that are so common on today’s software projects.
Blueprint’s rich visual requirements simulations keep stake-
holders engaged and let them understand the true meaning
of the requirements — a fundamental prerequisite for obtain-
ing better feedback. Blueprint also automatically generates
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52. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies40
requirements documents that support existing company
processes and provide the hard-copy artifacts that are
often needed for official sign-off. To get a better idea of the
Blueprint software’s approach to interactive online review,
approvals, and requirements simulations, see Figure 4-2.
Figure 4-2: Blueprint’s visual and interactive requirements simulation.
Managing requirements
Even after you’ve authored and validated your requirements,
you must still maintain them, track their histories, and keep
tabs on how they evolve over time. Blueprint was designed
with the entire requirements lifecycle in mind.
To begin, Blueprint automatically versions every requirement,
which makes it possible to examine each requirement’s entire
history beginning with the baseline. Next, Blueprint quickly
creates traceability that’s visible while working and is easy
to analyze through a suite of powerful tools. Traceability
helps you assess the impact of change, confirm coverage, and
manage scope. Figure 4-3 shows the fine-grained traceability
features of Blueprint.
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53. Chapter 4: Introducing Blueprint 41
Blueprint also encourages requirements reuse, which saves
time while promoting consistency. Finally, seamless integra-
tion with enterprise directories aids in bringing new users
onboard and simplifies the job of project maintenance.
Figure 4-3: Traceability with Blueprint.
Collaborating with team members
As we depict in Chapter 3, teamwork forms the foundation
for successful software projects. Blueprint helps users stay in
tune with what’s happening across multiple projects through
a wide range of social features, including a personal activity
center and threaded discussions with @mention — see it in
action in Figure 4-4. These capabilities are pervasive through-
out the product, which helps draw people into the conversa-
tion and encourages interaction.
Meanwhile, Blueprint employs visual requirements formats
and rich simulation to foster collaboration by removing
ambiguity and making complex requirements easier to under-
stand. In addition, instead of getting vital stakeholder feed-
back later in the lifecycle, with Blueprint you have access to
the features you need to engage stakeholders early and often
during the project.
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54. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies42
Figure 4-4: Threaded discussions with @mention.
Integrating with other
technologies
In Chapter 2 we demonstrate that the business analyst sits at
the center of the entire software project lifecycle. Therefore,
for maximum effectiveness, any business analysis tools must
tie in with technologies used by other stakeholders.
Blueprint incorporates practical integrations with the most
popular tools project team members use on application devel-
opment projects. It automatically generates a comprehensive
set of tests from the requirements, and then populates appli-
cation lifecycle management (ALM) solutions with those tests
and the underlying requirements — including complete trace-
ability. Figure 4-5 shows Blueprint generating test cases.
Blueprint also provides integration with Microsoft Excel that
lets users directly leverage the spreadsheet software’s many
features, or use it as a conduit to other third-party toolsets.
These integrations help ensure alignment of all groups who
collaborate on application projects.
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55. Chapter 4: Introducing Blueprint 43
Figure 4-5: Generating test cases with Blueprint.
Watching Blueprint at Work
In this section, we take you through a few examples of what
Blueprint has been up to. We detail some real customer
examples, and show you how Blueprint has transformed the
requirements definition and management process, along with
demonstrating the meaningful impact this transformation
has had on overall business performance. Getting blue isn’t
always so bad!
Banking industry solutions
A large global banking institution embarked on a multiyear
program to upgrade their core banking systems. All of the
over 1,000 people (distributed across 26 countries) in the pro-
gram who are authoring or collaborating on requirements are
using Blueprint. To enable such a large group of users, and
sustain them as staff and outsourcers change over time, the
institution is leveraging the online e-learning component of
Blueprint, allowing any number of users to learn at their own
pace and their supervisors to track their progress.
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56. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies44
Legal industry solutions
A prominent solution provider to the legal industry had to
transition its flagship software product to a more modern
platform and enhance it with significant new capabilities. The
organization turned to Blueprint as the requirements applica-
tion to define and manage this business-critical effort. Due to
the success of this initiative, the company has since standard-
ized on Blueprint as the requirements application used on all
IT software projects, enterprise-wide.
Health industry solutions
One of the largest health insurance organizations in the
United States recognized it was experiencing too much
rework, and reengineering, as well as poor requirements, and
organization members knew they were not taking advantage
of reuse opportunities in the area of requirements. In this
environment, the organization had a mandate to update their
systems to be ICD-10 compliant, a major undertaking across
their systems, before October 2013. After extensive research
they selected and deployed Blueprint, and formalized their
requirements processes around it as their standard require-
ments platform. Today their development projects are far
more predictable, reuse and efficiency has increased, and
they are well on their way to attaining ICD-10 compliance.
Legacy modernization solutions
A very large pension-provider organization needed to mod-
ernize a business-critical application hosted on a mainframe
system. The application had to adhere to strict pension legis-
lation or risk substantial penalties. The organization’s existing
requirements processes didn’t provide good visibility into the
as-is state of the system, putting all modernization work at
huge risk — and processes were so onerous that people regu-
larly subverted them to get their jobs done. After deploying
Blueprint, communications and collaboration around require-
ments improved to the extent that stakeholders now see
value in business analysis where before they had seen only
overhead. The as-is state of the system is now modeled for all
to analyze and understand. As a result, the application was
delivered on time and now operates in full compliance.
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57. Chapter 5
TenTipstoImprove
BusinessAnalyst
Productivity
In This Chapter
▶ Putting the power of pictures to work for you
▶ Including your stakeholders every step of the way
▶ Making life easy for your developers, your testers, and yourself
Throughout this book, we tell you about the ever-changing
role of the business analyst, the challenges business
analysts face, and how they can take steps to make projects
go more efficiently. This chapter puts all of this information to
work by presenting you with a series of field-tested guidelines
and best practices.
We begin by offering some suggestions about requirements
authoring, followed by several recommendations about how
to more effectively work with all of your stakeholders. Finally,
we provide a collection of our thoughts regarding smooth col-
laboration with the people charged with bringing your vision
to life: architects, developers and testers.
Leveraging Visual Models
In Chapter 3 we describe how diverse professions ranging
from architecture to mechanical engineering all use visualiza-
tions wherever possible. Visual models are absolutely critical
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58. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies46
if you’re going to do good analysis, and especially when defin-
ing complex solutions such as software. Get into the habit of
turning to visual representations whenever you can.
Want more details? Check out Joy Beatty’s and Anthony
Chen’s book Visual Models for Software Requirements, here:
http://trunc.it/n5x28.
Expressing Your Requirements
Every business analyst has the potential to do a great job
working with their stakeholders to create very expressive
visual models, but that’s only part of the story. These graphi-
cally rich artifacts are also superb for quickly and cleanly get-
ting information across to others such as developers, testers,
support and operations staff, and more, as you fully define
the requirements for your new solution. See an example in
Figure 5-1.
Figure 5-1: Expressing requirements visually.
You can use these models by themselves, or reference them
in requirements.
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59. Chapter 5: Ten Tips to Improve Business Analyst Productivity 47
Setting the Stage for Effective
Collaboration
Healthy partnerships don’t happen by accident. Instead, they
result from establishing the communication channels that you
want people to use, and then making sure these conduits are
accessible and efficient. If you fail to take these steps, people
get frustrated and simply bypass your painstakingly created
infrastructure. The end result is a flood of inefficient point-to-
point interactions. Blueprint provides an easy way to collabo-
rate, as shown in Figure 5-2.
Figure 5-2: Multi-party collaboration with Blueprint software.
Whatever mechanisms you set up to foster collaboration, they
need to be available 24/7 and worldwide to better support
your highly distributed teams.
Analyzing Stakeholders
All stakeholders are not created equal. In fact, some are more
influential than others. Therefore, the business analyst must
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60. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies48
first identify all of the relevant stakeholders for the project,
and then determine which of these parties outrank the others.
Failing to do so can derail a project before it even gets started.
Initially, start with the stakeholders funding the project. These
stakeholders give a good perspective of the intent of the appli-
cation. Another stakeholder group comes from governance,
compliance, risk, or other regulatory bodies; these people
will provide the governance required for the application as it
performs the intended role. Another group of stakeholders
focuses on the user roles of the application and provides the
operational perspective. Every requirement that ultimately
reaches the final set must be within the project’s intent, meet
the required governance demands, and provide value to the
user operationally.
For example, imagine gathering needs for a flight reservation
application. You specify the requirements and initiate devel-
opment but neglect to involve the employees who are in the
midst of modifying the company’s operating processes to
adhere to the latest changes in regulations. Then you find out
late in the development that some of these changes directly
impact the new flight reservation system. This scenario can
be incredibly expensive and delay rollout dramatically as
team members make unplanned changes (perform rework). If
you involve those stakeholders early in the process, however,
you can consider the regulatory process changes in the initial
requirements definition.
Getting the Right
Tool for the Job
As with any trade, if you don’t have the right tool your work
suffers.
As we describe in Chapter 2, many business analysts attempt
to leverage and even extend or customize, general-purpose
tools such as Microsoft Office to satisfy their unique
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61. Chapter 5: Ten Tips to Improve Business Analyst Productivity 49
requirements. Generally this tactic is highly inefficient, and it
can consume an enormous amount of time that can be better
spent focusing on your core responsibilities. Want to see
an effective requirements application in action? Check out
Blueprint in Figure 5-3.
Figure 5-3: Blueprint.
Avoiding Being a Slave
to the Document
Like any other massive piece of work, a requirements docu-
ment can take on a life of its own. Once it breaks its bonds
and staggers to its feet, it quickly becomes the focus of atten-
tion, and saps incredible amounts of energy just to keep it
organized and current.
Focus on the document’s content — the requirements — not
the container. And instead of relying too heavily on text,
strive for an approach that uses a blend of images, diagrams,
and words (see how Blueprint does it in Figure 5-4). The ulti-
mate goal is to prove that you have a clear definition of your
business solution. Any approach that achieves that objective
the most clearly is the right approach.
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62. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies50
Figure 5-4: The right approach: a blend of images, diagrams, and words.
Creating a Traceability Strategy
The only constant is change with respect to business analy-
sis: solutions inevitably evolve over time. Setting up a well-
designed traceability strategy yields valuable benefits, such as:
✓ Accurately managing change requests
✓ Guiding and controlling your project’s scope
✓ Measuring progress
In order to achieve these desirable outcomes, define a strat-
egy that accommodates change and which all of your stake-
holders can follow.
Embracing the Rationale
The day you deliver the application is just the first day of its
(hopefully) long and fruitful life. To lay the groundwork for
success, a business analyst delivers not only the solution, but
also a well-thought-out package of materials that his or her
colleagues will use to maintain and enhance the application
throughout its life.
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63. Chapter 5: Ten Tips to Improve Business Analyst Productivity 51
The package includes not just requirements but also all of
the analyses, discussions, debates, and trade-offs that led to
the requirements. All of the reasoning and rationale that led
to the requirement are often as important as the requirement
itself.
Planning Your Integration with
Development and Testing
Requirements are a means to an end. They are the blueprints
(as it were) for the software solution that will be built and
tested.
After your requirements are ready, the work is only beginning:
your next job is to plan how your colleagues in development
and quality assurance will consume this information effi-
ciently and without misinterpretations.
Starting Small and Evolving
Over Time
The requirements process, like any process, needs time to
mature and develop. As such, don’t attempt to cast in stone
every facet of the requirements process right out of the gate.
Allocate time to review what’s working and what isn’t and
adjust the process with lessons drawn from each completed
project.
This recommendation holds true when implementing a
requirements tool as well: cover the basic requirement types
and custom properties first and see what else is needed based
on needs that arise in a given project. Adding new require-
ment types and properties to the tool is always easier than
removing ones that really aren’t needed but may already have
information stored in them.
The worst approach you can take with your requirements pro-
cess or tool is to overcomplicate it from the start as doing so
hinders overall adoption and can quickly lead to the organiza-
tion abandoning both the process and the tool.
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64. Requirements Definition & Management For Dummies52
These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

65. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

66. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.